Wraps off goon squad's antics

The Government didn't want an inquiry into the rogue goon squad working out of Canterbury prisons.

For three years a series of Corrections Ministers rejected any investigation, with the latest, Paul Swain, saying an inquiry would only give rival politicians an excuse to "use every whingeing ex-criminal's complaint to have a slag at the department".

Now, given lawyer Ailsa Duffy's crushing report into the bungled management of the elite band of prison officers, crusading MPs such as New Zealand First's Ron Mark can justify a little "slagging" of the Department of Corrections.

For Queen's Counsel Duffy has delivered a report to the State Services Commission which indicates prison officers routinely flouted standard policies for the treatment of inmates, and possibly worked outside the law.

Not only was there systemic abuse of prisoners' legal and human rights, but they may also have been physically abused.

And she says senior head office and regional managers must have - or should have - known what was going on.

She says the department had enough information to know that all the internal inquiries it set up to investigate the goon squad were not sufficiently rigorous and would fail.

She also says the Senior Inspector of Prisons, Grenville Bell, whose job is to be a watchdog over prisoners' rights, compromised the independence of that statutory position by failing to conduct a proper inquiry.

This despite the whistle-blowing from not only prisoners, but from the department's own employees.

It is a report the Government should find difficult to ignore. Yet it now wants to legislate to seriously weaken the rights of any inmate to be compensated for ill-treatment, even if the abuse is state-sanctioned.

That law will be pursued even as the Office of the Ombudsmen orders its own fresh inquiry into the treatment of prisoners in New Zealand jails.

And there are now renewed calls for the position of the Senior Inspector of Prisons (now Corrections, after a 2004 law change) to be removed from the department's oversight.

Even though the position is by law meant to be independent, Mr Mark asks how that can be the case when the senior inspector is appointed by the department's chief executive.

There are comparisons with changes made last year by Prime Minister Helen Clark to the job of Inspector-General of Security and Intelligence, after a court ruled that Inspector Laurie "outski" Greig might be perceived as biased in his review of Algerian Ahmed Zaoui's security status.

Helen Clark, the minister responsible for the Security Intelligence Service, moved the job outside the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to shut down criticisms that the inspector may be a puppet of the security services.

Concerns also remain, too, from Mr Mark that senior managers within the Corrections Department have kept their jobs and indeed been promoted, since the goon squad debacle and alleged abuses.

That compares with a Department of Labour media manager, Ian Smith, losing his job last year for misleading an Ombudsman over an internal memo about Zaoui's detention.

Ailsa Duffy's inquiry focused on what the department actually did about the goon squad once complaints began to surface about it. Her findings are damning.

In effect, she says "every" investigation the department instituted to investigate claims against the goon squad was bound to fail and that it had enough information on hand to know they would.

Specifically, she says, investigations were "poorly conceived, narrowly constrained and without the capability to examine the full picture".

All but one of four internal inquiries failed to follow standard policy for an investigation.

And for that, she lays the blame squarely at the department's leadership, not its internal systems.

"The failure to choose the appropriate type of investigation was a human error."

She notes management failures at the regional level, for allowing an out-of-control, severe and military-style squad to operate, and at head office, for not even noticing.

Notably, she says department chief executive Mark Byers saw squad members searching cells in 1999, yet he says he was only told who they were five months later.

She makes it clear senior Canterbury managers Paul Monk and Paul Rushton should have seen what was happening with the unit operating in their prisons.

"Once the CERU [Canterbury Emergency Response Unit] began to change in character, I find it impossible to believe that either Mr Monk or Mr Rushton, two senior regional managers based at Christchurch Men's Prison, could have failed to observe this occurrence."

She says Mr Rushton was briefed by goon squad leaders about what they were doing before and sometimes after operations.

Both senior head office managers, and Mr Monk and Mr Rushton, denied to Ailsa Duffy that they ever authorised the goon squad's actions.

But she thinks its manager, Tony Bird, was too "low-level" to have been able to change the unit's direction, budget and staffing on his own.

And she describes a tendency for senior regional and head office managers to distance themselves from what happened.

Of management claims that the unit was secretive and therefore it was hard to know what they were doing, she says: "Anyone in Christchurch Men's Prison would have seen them in operation."

She lists Mr Bird's evidence, in which he says of the general manager of the Public Prison Service, Phil McCarthy, and head office's assistant general manager, operations, Bryan McMurray: "You don't start up a new unit, call it a response unit and equip it as a response unit and have people, at that level, not knowing what it's doing. That's just ridiculous.

"There was certainly no hiding the activities that we were engaged in because every time somebody came down from head office Paul Monk asked us to put on a demonstration for them."

The department, in its submission to Ailsa Duffy, admitted it did not put in place clear lines of management or accountability for the squad.

She says there was a complete breakdown in good governance.

Now the department cannot criticise the goon squad for operating outside the law "when at the time those events occurred the department, by its silence and neglect to intervene, condoned what occurred".

Of Mr Bell's inquiry, she says he held the power to order an investigation into anything he saw fit, rather than the limited inquiry he conducted which was ordered by Mr McCarthy.

"Mr Bell had complete control over his investigation."

It says he should have seen the potential for abuse of prisoners' legal rights in the material available. He should also have realised the possibility that the searches of 51 prisoners were unlawful.

The Duffy report accuses him of "serious" failing by not conducting a full inquiry, and says he "compromised his statutory powers and independence as a senior inspector of prisons".

In its response to the Duffy report, Mr Byers said lessons had been learned and changes made to management systems to ensure there could be no repeat.

Mr Byers, who leaves his job next month, said he hoped "the release of the report will bring closure to the matter and allow those involved to move forward".

The goon squad

* The Emergency Response Unit of 11 officers was formed in 1999 in the lead-up to problems around Y2K, the Millennium New Year. It was disbanded a year later.

* Its purpose changed swiftly to a specialist emergency response unit - its members wearing special uniforms, carrying riot tools and operating in groups.

* Alleged abuses include late-night raids on cells after lockdown, unlawful strip searches - with some inmates forced to bend over, naked, even though that was banned - and the use of force on prisoners when it was not justified.

* One prisoner has already been compensated for an illegal strip search.

* Last week, the Christchurch District Court reserved a decision on the $150,000 civil damages claim of another prisoner, convicted murderer Ra Albert O'Dowd.

* Other prisoners are considering monetary claims, and other complaints about unlawful treatment have been made to, and upheld by, the Ombudsman.